Just watch him; he is as busy as a man can be; his hands are full of orders, his head is occupied with many anxieties, his eye is on the indicator board, or scanning the room; arms and legs are working as fast as nature will permit; he must concentrate at all times. His ears ring with the strife of the room; all sorts of rumors, many of them ridiculous, are hastily whispered to him; “boos” and groans from the bears, shrieks and yells from the bulls—this is the sort of thing he hears all the day long. How can he form an opinion when thus distracted? He stands too close to the picture; he lacks perspective. What such a man thinks of the market isn’t worth anything; indeed, he does not “think” at all except about executing his orders, and heaven knows that is enough to engross him.
Answering all the questions that come to him over the wires is the hardest task, and the most distasteful thing the floor man is called on to do. He knows that he doesn’t know anything; from his point of view no information is better than misinformation. He feels with Josh Billings, “It’s a mitey site better not 2 no so mutch than 2 no so mutch that ain’t so,” but nevertheless he must continue to express views and theories and opinions and predictions, whether he likes it or not. Some of his oracular utterances are illuminating. “Market is going down,” he replies, “because there are more sellers than buyers.” Inexorable logic.
There was old Y——, who used to talk to his customers sitting near his office window, which faced Battery Park. He was a shifty professor of finance who never was known to hold the same opinion of the stock market two days running. “This market,” he said one day, “is going away up, crops are good, money is easy, railroads are rolling in wealth, and—look over there”—pointing to a line of immigrants walking through the park from the landing place—“the brawn and sinew of old Europe coming over here to develop our resources.” The very next day the market had what is called a “healthy reaction.” Quite unmindful of his consoling prophecies of yesterday, old Y—— looked at the tape and said, “This market is going away down. Crops are poor, money is tight, railroads are in a bad way, and—look over there”—pointing to another procession of immigrants—“the scum of Europe coming over here to rob our American laborers.”
If that portion of the public which buys and sells stocks often has its little joke at the expense of brokers, so also brokers in their turn frequently have cause to laugh at their clients. “Cheer up,” was the message sent over the wire by a hopeful broker to a despondent client; “cheer up, the market can only go two ways.” “Yes,” was the reply, “but it has so damn many ways of going those two ways.” During the rubber boom of 1910 on the London Stock Exchange, a broker wired to a client in Ireland, “Rise in bank rate considered likely,” to which he received a prompt reply, “Buy me five hundred.” A telegram came over a private line one day last summer from a customer in Montreal. It was a deadly dull period, when, owing to the indifference of the public, stockbrokers were not making expenses. “What are you chaps doing over there?” said the telegram. “Why don’t you start something?” to which the floor member replied, “Read St. Luke 7:32.”[99] This must have been the same member who, when customers were few and far between, hastily ’phoned his office partner, “Put all our customers into copper,” to which his partner replied with grim resignation, “He won’t be down to-day.”
When the gong rings at three, the day’s work on ’Change is at an end, and the shouting and the tumult dies. It is then 8 P.M. in London, and there in the Street hard by the Exchange, even at that ungodly hour, brokers and jobbers in the “Yankee” market are still at work in all kinds of weather. “The American market,” says the (London) Quarterly Review, “continues, as a rule, to deal up to 8 P.M. (5 P.M. on Saturdays), when the cable offices on this side close down. Up to that time wires are coming in continually from New York with orders and prices; and a man would be ill advised to undertake jobbing in the American market unless he has a splendid constitution and lives within easy reach of town. Every year the Yankee market levies a death-tax upon its members through the medium of pneumonia and other complaints brought on by long exposure in the Street after official hours; and very little is done to provide these late dealers with adequate accommodations or shelter.”[100]
Before leaving the Board after the official close, the broker will stop for a moment at the loan crowd to borrow or lend his stocks, after which he spends a half hour or so in his office, going over the events of the day with his partners and customers, and familiarizing himself with the day’s doings. The specialists, floor traders, and two-dollar men, many of whom have no partners and no office staff, will go directly home, loitering perhaps for a late luncheon, or something stronger, at the club upstairs, or at a famous café across New Street. When times are brisk it is not an uncommon thing for partners to remain at their offices until a late hour, and clerks are often on duty until the small hours of the morning, spending what is left of the night at a nearby hotel in order to save time.
Holidays are not numerous on the Stock Exchange, being limited to the days set apart by law, and to very rare occasions in dull times when by petition of a majority of the members a Saturday half holiday is granted by the governors. It is felt, very properly, that special holidays should be granted but rarely, because the intimate relationship of the banks to brokerage houses is such that whenever the banks are doing business large borrowers should always be prepared to meet calls that may be made upon them. On the London Exchange, what with bank holidays and the festival seasons of the Church of England, the stockbroker has many more holidays than his American colleague.
Life on the Stock Exchange is by no means unpleasant. It is not the idle pastime that many writers picture it, with easy hours and long intervals for luncheon, nor is it the depressing and nerve-destroying centre that many of the members would have us believe. One may certainly linger over the midday meal for hours—for that matter one may absent one’s self altogether—and conversely, one may worry and fret over the day’s vexations until life becomes unpleasant for him and for every one near him. But by far the larger number find their work as congenial as earning the daily bread may be, and vastly more diverting than many of the sedentary occupations in other lines of business. Elsewhere I have said that the long periods of dulness on the floor constitute the most serious obstacle the broker has to meet. Accustomed to physical activity and with a mind inured to occupation, he chafes under a stagnation that is foreign to his habits and desires, until worry—the disease of the age—claims him for its own. Almost every broker’s wife knows what I mean. It becomes a habit with such a man; unconsciously he grows “bearish” on his business, on himself, and on his associates, and at such times he is an awful bore.
The essential thing for a man to bear in mind who finds himself growing into this mood is that nature abhors a vacuum. His mind is empty because there is nothing to do; he must therefore find something to do—some mental occupation that will banish from his mind the worries that beset him. In order to do this many members of the Exchange carry some light reading in their pockets for use in an idle hour; at the spot where the National Lead Company’s securities are dealt in the specialists maintain a compact circulating library of all the magazines and periodicals; others spend idle moments pouring over a pocket chessboard; the Reading Railway post has a constantly increasing collection of all kinds of puzzles, riddles, problems—anything to keep the mind active on the principle of similia similibus curantur.
The newcomer on the Stock Exchange will do well to fortify himself in some such way, for it may be accepted as gospel truth that the paralyzing effect of worry in this peculiar environment will inevitably lead to hasty actions, mistakes, and errors of judgment, unless the victim learns early in the game how to arm himself against these misfortunes. One word more: When the day’s work is done, the young member must learn Doctor Saleeby’s great lesson, that a round of the links, or a set at tennis, or any other form of outdoor diversions so dear to the youngster’s heart, will not of themselves suffice to banish cares.